Abstract:

Universities face the challenge of helping students acquire skills for the global digital workplace: virtual teamwork, project management, business communication, and intercultural competence. Many students cannot take advantage of study abroad programs (UNESCO, 2014), and instructors are welcoming internationalization-at-home (IaH) efforts, which include engaging students in collaborative online international learning (COIL) (Agnew & Kahn, 2014). COIL projects involve students around the globe working virtually on collaborative technologies for several weeks up to an entire semester. Thus, students gain indispensable experiential learning for future employability (Starke-Meyerring, 2010; Swartz et al, 2019; Crawford, 2021). The emergence of the global pandemic in 2020 reinforced the need for online experiential learning.

Virtual Business Professional (VBP) is an innovative COIL project program created for business communication classes at a North American business school in 2015. Over five years, VBP has developed into a multidisciplinary, global virtual team project involving more than 500 students from sixteen institutions in seven countries (Finland, France, Germany, India, Lithuania, Spain, and several states of the United States, ranging from New York to Hawaii). This independent project lasts six weeks and allows participating faculty to embed it as part of their various curricula. Students from universities around the world are assigned to virtual teams of 5-6 members, each student from a different institution. Using free team collaboration platforms and video conferencing tools, such as Slack and Zoom, teams research and report on a clients’ business case. The clients may include Google, Starbucks, Amazon, Netflix or Audi, who rank the top three reports and provide feedback to the students. Teams of instructors assess the reports according to a mutual grading rubric. The project involves no less than 10% of students’ final course grade.

This temporary, virtual teaming around a real client project with members from geographically dispersed locations addresses the need to develop virtual and cultural intelligence as well as digital communication savviness in preparation for the modern, global workplace. Research involving student development supports the role of VBP projects in helping increase student resilience, as well as in honing their skills for future employability (Logemann et al, 2022; Swartz & Shrivastava, 2021). These studies underline the relevance of experiential learning through incorporating global virtual team projects in higher education classrooms.

Keywords:

Global virtual team projects, COIL, client-based projects, experiential learning.